Well, I guess out of all the tragic news of Disney's buyout of Lucas Arts and then shuttering the game studio, there had to be some blip of good news...
In tribute to the doomed studio, Raven Software has finally released the source code for Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy under a GNU GPLv2 license.
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Raven is sad to hear about the closing of LucasArts today, we respected them and enjoyed working with them over the years. We wish the best for all the talented people who were let go and hope they find good work in studios in the industry... We loved and appreciated the experience of getting to make Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy for LucasArts. As a gift to the persistently loyal fanbase for our Jedi games and in memory of LucasArts, we are releasing the source code for both games for people to enjoy and play with.
Later today on Steam we will be releasing the official tool kit for RAGE – the same tools used to create RAGE and it’s DLC, The Scorchers. From the game’s world building tool, idStudio, to game maps and assets, the kit provides everything you need to get started with modding the first-ever idTech 5 title.
Interested? Before you start downloading the hefty 35+ GB file, the RAGE team has provided some documents to read. As described in the welcome document, these tools provided are complex and aimed towards “technically sophisticated and adventurous” modders.
We probably won't be seeing too many mod projects given the hefty amount of resources, manpower and processing required to create quality work, but at least it'll be interesting for those brave enough to tinker with the development tools.
There's also a few rather daunting tweets from John Carmack:
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The toolkit release is not something that we consider consumer friendly, but it does let you get a look inside the construction process...
Doing significant work will require patience, because internally we use a 300 core renderfarm for megatexture creation.
Maybe the modding community could work out some kind of "folding" network.